Writers of fantasy stories are often inspired and influenced by, well, other fantasy stories.
But in the following email interview, author Lynn Buchanan says she was inspired to write her fairy tale-esque adventure fantasy story The Dollmakers (paperback, Kindle, audiobook) by a painting, and influenced in how she wrote it by watching a certain Japanese animation studio’s iconic movies.
It’s not an understatement to say that the 2017 top-down medieval adventure video game 9th Dawn (a.k.a. 9th Dawn: Classic – Clunky Controls Edition) is a cult game. Try googling it; I dare you.
But people who loved that game are in for a treat as it’s not only getting an updated edition this week called 9th Dawn: Remake, it’s also getting a prequel novel called 9th Dawn: The Book Of Nameless, which is available as a PDF in a bundle with the game, and will be released individually as an eBook later this year, and as a limited edition print edition in 2025.
In the following email interview, The Book Of Nameless author L.R. Gaunt discusses what inspired and influenced this prequel novel, while discussing how exactly it connects to the new version of the game.
There’s such a thing as being too clever. Which is what I might’ve said to Cloaked Press editor Andrew M. Ferrell when I realized their series of fantasy short story anthologies, Fall Into Fantasy, usually come out in September, while the companion series, Spring Into SciFi, are typically released…well, you know. Took me a moment, too.
That is, until I read through the following email interview he and I did about Fall Into Fantasy 2024 (paperback, Kindle), in which Ferrell made a point of saying, “…this is a passion for me. I don’t choose my authors based on their marketability or only look for bigger names. … This is an anthology for fantasy lovers curated by a lover of fantasy.”
Since kicking off The Maradaine Saga with The Thorn Of Dentonhill in 2015, author Marshall Ryan Maresca has added more than a dozen novels to this epic fantasy series.
But he’s also included some shorter stand-alone novellas as well in a subseries he calls The Maradaine Saga Shorts, which he started in 2022 with The Mystical Murders Of Yin Mara.
In the following email interview, Maresca talks about the fourth novella in The Maradaine Saga Shorts series, The Royal First Irregulars (paperback, Kindle), including what inspired and influenced this shorter story, and why you don’t have to read the 19 previous books first.
For her sixth and latest collection of short stories, A Place Between Waking And Forgetting (paperback), author Eugen Bacon has assembled a collection that — as she explains in the following email interview — “largely comprises black people stories exploring affection, dread, anguish, or hope.”
Some writers are very intentional. They sit down each day with the intent of writing a story, one they intend to be published in a magazine or journal, and then collected in a book with their name on it.
But in the following email interview about A Bucket Full Of Moonlight (paperback, Kindle), his book with his name on it, author Christopher J. Burke says these short stories actually, “…started as a writing exercise…”
In the following email interview, author Cameron Johnston says his new novel The Last Shield (paperback, Kindle, audiobook) is a “gender-flipped Die Hard.”
But while that might conjure images of Zendaya or Sydney Sweeny or some other actress of the moment crawling through a skyscraper’s air vents, Johnston says Shield actually takes place in a “mysterious castle” and is a “heroic fantasy [story], with shadings of grimdark thrown in.”
When people write science fiction stories about people on the moon, they often take the “science” part seriously.
But when Nathan Ballingrud was writing his pulpy lunar gothic novella, Crypt Of The Moon Spider (paperback, Kindle), in which there’s people living on the moon, and they worship a spider that used to live there, he not only didn’t bother being scientifically accurate, he also didn’t write a science fiction story.